


On the Tides Go

by Bandy



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 02:07:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5767192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bandy/pseuds/Bandy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ocean is slowly stealing my mind. It’s growing more and more difficult to tell what’s real and what’s a dream. Dreams pass in hazy green waves. They push and pull like the tides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Tides Go

The world moves in slow motion, drawn by the tides and sustained by tiny bubbles floating to the surface carrying my screams towards the bright unknown wasteland a thousand miles above my head where the pressure can’t hurt me where the weight of the ocean can’t crush me--weakling that I am--they’re all stronger than me, they were forged in the fires of dying planets all of them Pearls and Amethysts and even diamonds fused by suffering bonded by the same weight shattering--

“Hey, look,” Jasper said, the first words I ever heard come out of her mouth, “they blew up another transport.”

Eerie lights sparkled on the planet’s surface. From our height I could just make out the shape of a gem ship spiraling into the ocean. “The reports said the planet was unoccupied,” I reminded Jasper, though we both knew it already. When the alarms first went off, everybody had scrambled to a window to watch the first wave get annihilated. After the commotion died down, most of them returned to work. Jasper wouldn’t drop until the fourth wave, I had learned offhandedly, and my trip to the planet’s surface had been delayed indefinitely, what with the ambush and all. To assuage the boredom and stress, we found an unoccupied port window in one of the ship’s many airlock corridors and watched the tiny blue gem below us as it erupted into flames and cracked. “I suppose that means the Quartz is dead. Do you think the plants were smart enough to send a false positive?”

“Really?” The warrior types, with the exception of the superintelligent freaks with silicon abnormalities, talked more or less with the same self-satisfied drawl. This one seemed especially contempt with my hogging the window. “I know you’re only here as a glorified water pump, but look at the situation from their angle. They tricked us, don’t you see? Rose Quartz.” Jasper turned to me, all steam and four eyes--a premonition. “She tricked us. Don’t you see? She tricked us, Lapis. She knew we would be unprepared. This is her victory.”

Endless undersea wastelands as dark as space spread out before me. How I wished her voice was sweeter. Gems have their own color to their voices. Few are pretty. Days go by where I pray for Rose Quartz to burst out of that unnatural meatman shell and part the waters with her voice and kiss my deformed lips and make my voice beautiful. When I scream, all I hear is suffering. All I hear is me, the waves of the vast and endless ocean.

 

I open my mouth and roar. Water rushes in. I breathe the ocean and can’t drown.

Somewhere above me was a moon. I could feel it pulling on me. “Have you noticed the tidal force?” I asked my commander--who probably couldn’t, though it was still worth bringing to their attention. “It’s unbelievable. I’ll bet we could see the tidal bulge from space if we tried.” 

 

“Not a mission priority,” they replied, as expected. “Your mission priority is to pump water to the designated off-planet repositories.” I tried to argue that I wouldn’t be able to properly execute my mission if I were unable to control the ocean, but they responded the same way as before. Not a mission priority.

On the tides go, pushing and pulling our body in the sand at the bottom of everything. There are times when I lose control of parts of our body, hours or weeks (I can’t tell) when my sight is stolen. When my vision fades into sunspot nightmares and eerie lights, when my armor is shredded, I am left to feel the tides from deep within our body.

 

“Help me,” I can hear us gasp. I can’t reply. She has my mouth. “We’re dying. We’re going to shatter down here alone with you. What did I ever do to you that you wouldn’t do to me?”

On the tides go. She’s done this before. Calculated attacks on my psyche. Little victories like stealing my mouth for a few minutes, trying to get my guard down. Trying to make me weak. Trying to make me remember. I won’t give in. When I take my thoughts away from the immediate present--the chains, the ocean, the pain--she grows stronger. My suffering is my only weapon. Of this I am not conflicted. My shackles are my hands and feet, the chains my arms and legs. 

Pearl and Amethyst and Garnet (the freak) and Steven (the kind meatman) and Lapis and--Peridot, her too. I can see their faces in the water. They come to me in waking dreams. They dance on the tides. Sometimes they open their mouths, like they’re trying to smile. Before the water pressure rips their jaws open and punches their teeth in, before the water rushes in, their eyes grow glassy and green, tinted by the ocean. In my time down here at the bottom of the ocean, I’ve learned that green is not the color of envy; it is the color of betrayal.

“Enemies of the natural order,” I could hear Jasper rant. “This world could have seeded millions of gems. She’s trying to kill them all.” She paced around the tiny hallway while I leaned against the wall and looked out the port window at earth. The perspective had shifted somewhat due to our orbit. I could now see a spiny column of mountains stretching up the southernmost horizon. I tried to get a better look only to lose my footing as the ship shuddered and rebalanced. Jasper jumped to the window and pressed her nose to the glass with an audible clink. “They’re sending another transport? This is outrageous. They need to send the warriors down there so we can kill them already.”

 

“One won’t be enough,” I commented offhandedly as the doomed ship glided towards the surface.

New rage gripped Jasper. She resumed her pacing and muttered, “You’re right Lapis. One won’t be enough. If we let this mutiny slide, they’re going to try and save every worthless bug in the entire universe.” At the end of every lap she slowed her pace to track the transport ship. When it broke the cloud layer and disappeared, she stopped. “They care more about trees and plants than their own kin. Disgusting.”

Litany and lies. The ones we were told and the ones we told ourselves. The difference between them felt so real, so internal, but were they? Is Jasper still my prisoner? She is me, and I am her. Together we are not quite each other. My gem rattles somewhere inside this abomination. I am in chains at the bottom of the ocean.

Yellow light tears through the corporeal connection between Jasper and myself. Too late I realize what has happened and redouble my efforts to remain in one piece. With the one arm I still possess I claw at a jet of energy stabbing through my cheek, trying to hold the wound shut. The pain is extraordinary. Our form smears across the ocean floor as I’m left teetering in the sand, half in and half out, stuck ankle-deep in the bottom of the world. Water rushes into the cracks and pushes our gems further apart.

 

“We weren’t expecting a war,” Jasper intones above the roar of the ocean. “I’ll give them a war, if that’s what they want.”

Antiphonal wails shook the spaceship from end to end. We had called with fire. Now the earth was responding. All communications broke down as pink light rose from beneath the clouds like a bubble reaching the surface of the ocean. Though we were separated by a vacuum and a polycarbonate hull, I could feel our whole fleet tense in one tremendous perilous moment of silence as all eyes turned to watch a beam of pure light shatter the atmosphere and scream towards the fleet. 

“They’re gonna blow up the ship,” Jasper breathed. Her gem sparkled in the eerie light. “Lapis, they’re gonna blow up the ship! Lapis!--”

Everything returns to now. It’s growing more and more difficult to tell what’s real. Dreams pass in hazy green waves. They push and pull like the tides.

Reaching for the light like desperate addicts, we go on. Jasper and I. Malachite. Each other. We reach because we have arms and legs, and we reach for light because it is all we know. Gems are light. Gems are suns and moons and nuclear fusion and smoke and mirrors.

 

As Jasper and I floated away from earth, hands clasped firmly together, spinning like a gem frisbee through the destroyed wreckage of our fleet, it dawned on me that space is like an ocean without water. For three days we floated before we gave up hope of rescue.

No one was coming for us.

Down we sank, deeper and deeper into the black. The earth and the wreckage around it shimmered in the sunlight like a bubble of air rising towards the surface of a still, dark ocean. Somewhere in the prolonged panic and desperation we became one.

 

For the first time in my life, I understood why other gems feared the ocean.

Even as I spread my wings and began the arduous task of dragging myself and Jasper back to Homeworld, I could feel the feeling creeping through me. Space developed a green tint. Time rocked me back and forth like the gentle irreversible tide. I panic. Am I back in space? Had I been at the bottom of the ocean the whole time? Had I been down here forever? I collapse under the pressure of a planet, and water rushes in. The choreography of each battle felt so preordained, each dance with fate so clumsy and inane. No longer am I in the hands of my enemy, but my own.

A long time ago, I told myself that I was done being everyone’s prisoner. From now on, Jasper would be my prisoner.

Really, that was a lie. I am my own prisoner. On the tides go, their endless push and pull--hopefully, until we die.

**Author's Note:**

> Retrospective (with minor spoilers): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XBehw5K543L407Ohqb2p3WlLrrT4agYPM0U76BmIk98/edit?usp=sharing


End file.
